


The Engine Driver

by orphan_account



Category: Princess Tutu, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Dance Metaphors, Fairy Tale Elements, Fate & Destiny, Free Will, M/M, Metafiction, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, there was a baby boy born with ink-stained hands and a starshot of scar on one shoulder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Engine Driver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChapBook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChapBook/gifts).



> From a squee-inducing prompt from ChapBook for the AO3 Fundraiser Auction: a _Sherlock_ fic that contains many of the themes from _Princess Tutu_.
> 
> I owe so many thanks to so many people. Thank you to ChapBook for being a patient, clever, and considerate auction winner; to destinationtoast, ShinySherlock, and orithea (agameofscones) for beta-ing a mess and teaching me how to turn it into a story; to the lovely team that ran the AO3 Fundraiser Auction; to aderyn for soul-deep encouragement.
> 
> I have tried to make this fic accessible to those who have not watched _Princess Tutu_ , but I hope that those who have seen the anime will enjoy it, too.
> 
> This piece being so much about writing, I couldn't resist weaving in The Decemberists' [The Engine Driver](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG1FlsgLQQY). Mea culpa.
> 
> Presented with infinite apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was probably a nice dude.

Once upon a time, there was an author who hated writing fiction. Short stories paid well, though, so he crafted wounded characters, let them find solace in each other, and took great pleasure in tearing them apart. As sneaky as he was sadistic, the author kept a secret: when he very much wanted to (and in his fiction, which he so loathed, he did not want to), he could make the words he wrote come true. With this gift, he brought himself great wealth, a beautiful wife, obliging children, professional acclaim--over time, everything he wanted became his. 

The writer, whose surname was Doyle, invented a doctor who went to war whole and came back broken. He wrote a detective the doctor could protect, a genius who was immeasurably bright and immeasurably lonely. The detective drew clues from dust and mud, uncovering truth from the faintest impressions. A snake of terrible training, a hound with jaws of fire, a clever singer from across the sea: in case after case, the detective observed and deduced and concluded what must be true. The doctor, a bit of a writer himself, told his tales to their public and stitched up the detective and sat with him by their fire. He was a witness to his partner’s melancholies and euphorias, an audience for his violin, and the object of his most profound affections.

Doyle was not about to let his characters keep their contentment. He made a nemesis for the detective, a magpie of a man who stole truths and wove them into nests of lies. The magpie threatened the doctor’s life to lure the detective into battle, and while fighting at a waterfall’s edge, both magpie and detective tumbled into the abyss.

Refusing to accept an eternity of separation from his doctor, the detective made an extraordinary sacrifice in the moments before he died: he performed an old and forbidden magic to shatter his heart into pieces, each shard more deadly sharp than the last. The spell forced his spirit and his doctor’s from the page and drove them into the real world. They would be reborn there with free will more than one hundred years later, but the detective would not be capable of showing his doctor any affection: if the detective acted on his love, his heart would heal, and he and the doctor would lose their free will and be drawn back into Doyle’s story.

To his surprise, Doyle found that his decision to kill the detective and split the doctor apart with grief was... unpopular. His readers turned on him. Effigies were lit. Pitchforks were sharpened. Bags of unspeakable contents appeared on Doyle’s porch. The readers had spoken: they wanted their characters back.

It was brazenly unfair. Doyle wrote poetry! He wrote occult pamphlets! He wrote histories! He wrote very informed tracts about the necessity of the wars abroad! His readers cared nothing for his depth of personality and experience. Why didn’t they appreciate his work? Why didn’t they appreciate _him_? Who were these damnable sods who insisted that he revive that damnable detective, and why was he cursed with damnable simpletons for readers? 

Simpletons, it emerged, had a visceral violence about them. A group of them stormed Doyle’s house in the dead of night and cut off his hands, and, for good measure, his head: if he would not write them their story, they did not see why he should write any story at all.

Being clever and a coward, however, Doyle had found a way to cheat Death: before he was attacked, he had written about himself. In great detail, he had described his soul surviving, his mind enduring--oh, there was never a work so intricate, so precise. His intention was fierce, his craft flawless, and when his body died, Doyle’s spirit lived on, waiting to inhabit a new form.

So come, now, all you who love stories. Gather near the fire, and hear how Doyle found himself dead and yet alive, powerless and yet full of potential, waiting in the world’s shadows for a chance to take his revenge on the doctor and the detective. 

*

Once upon a time, there was a baby boy born with ink-stained hands and a starshot of scar on one shoulder. 

“The ink means he’s got the writing gift,” his mother said, settling the infant in the crook of her arm. “The scar means he’s a story spirit, God help us. I thought those only existed in fairy tales.”

His da, a short and solid man, dug his hands into his overalls’ sweet-filled pockets and _hmph_ ed. “He can’t be too different to other children, can he?”

The thing about John, who remembered from birth the life he’d lived with his detective, was that he managed to seem like other children. He knew when his parents could help him, and when they’d had too much to drink and he’d do better to help himself. He smiled, and squabbled, and played at war, and listened to his parents when they told him to never, ever write about the future because the words might come true. He learned early not to talk about his previous life, though it was safe to share his memories with his sister Harry. Harry, a dancer, was forever ordering John to help her practice what she’d learned in class; John was a wretched dancer, but a willing enough accomplice. He liked the exercise, and he realised that Harry found the same solace in dance that he found in helping his classmates when they hurt themselves on the playground. 

“Leave the dance to the women,” his da advised him, though he never banned John and Harry’s practices outright. John’s da drove great locomotive engines that shuddered on their rails all across England, and he kept track of their pace on his scuffed old pocket watch. “It’s a fine thing to drive an engine. You control it, boy,” he said to John. “You don’t let it control you. Now, you do the same with life, and you’ll get where you want to go.”

 _But trains can only go where someone built them rails,_ John thought, sucking on a butterscotch sweet, but he knew better than to say it. His da rambled happily about engines (“You best take care of your equipment, son, or it’ll break faster than you can blame your sister for breaking your mum’s good teapot. Oh, don’t make that face, I won’t tell. Harry’ll thrash you when she finds out, though.”) Harry had not, in fact, thrashed him, but she had made him wear one of her tutus for a week of their dance practices. John would’ve preferred a thrashing.

Harry told him, regularly, how stupid he was to miss, painfully, a man he knew only from memories he’d had since birth. “Whatever you were to each other, Johnny,” she told him as they waltzed in Harry’s living room the day before he started class at Saint Bart’s, “you’re not anymore. You’re wild to find him, but he’s not here. Forget him and focus on your studies, would you?” 

John remembered being a doctor, remembered caring for a detective. _His_ detective. Remembered the tender, piercing songs of a violin; remembered pine-smoked teas and fluffs of white tobacco ash. Remembered the sharp profile of a sharp man, one who did not show his love to others and who would not suffer others to show their love to him, nestled against his chest, trusting John to protect him even in sleep.

He couldn’t forget him any more than he could put down his scar. 

The years wore on, and John finished his training and became a doctor, disappointing his da, and chose to go to war, disappointing his mum. He craved the adventure, craved the sense that he was doing his duty by his country. He found a world in which he was needed, endangered, a part of a whole: it was almost as good as what he’d had in the life he remembered. If he enjoyed the sense of a job well done after he made a kill shot--if someone died because his country told him to shoot--if sometimes, it felt good to do it: well. It was war. Dying was what people did. He wouldn’t dwell on it.

 _And it distracts me,_ he thought. _From what I don’t have._ Who _I don’t have._

He didn’t dance once.

After ten years of fighting, he saw people in terms of the dead and the could-be-dead. Protecting his own didn’t feel as good as it would have felt to protect his detective--he knew that by instinct--but it did feel good.

He could protect them so much better, though, if he could control what would happen. The surprise attacks--the bullets from the unseen snipers--the wounds he dressed on men and women who hadn’t expected fire--John could prevent them all. 

He could be a hero. 

John summoned his courage, and, working late into the night, he did what had been forbidden to him: he wrote about the future. He told of the enemy pouring fast and fierce over the ridge, of his friends overcoming them, of his regiment’s victory making Queen and country proud.

To his wonder, it came true. To his horror, it did not happen as he had written it. 

The enemy came, yes, and his regiment met them, yes. But the regiment was unprepared and outnumbered, and as the dead piled up, John crawled from body to body. He looked for someone, anyone, to save; he was tying a tourniquet when he was hit.

He stared at the seeping hole in his thigh. _So much for dance practice, Harry,_ he thought, even though he didn’t dance anymore and he hadn’t seen Harry in years. His trousers had charred where the bullet had gone in. No exit wound: the improvised bullet had lodged metal fragments in him. It was a wound that was likely to kill him, and if it didn’t, the recovery would.

 _Not yet. Not before I find him,_ John thought, just before the pain tore him from himself. _Please, God, let me live._

*

Once upon a time, there was a baby boy born without a heart, coughing river water from his flooded lungs. 

The delivery nurse told his parents that he was a story spirit, a character who’d crashed into a world that was not his own. “He’ll be lonely,” she said. “No one will remember what he remembers.” 

His parents told the nurse that that was enough of that sort of talk, and they would thank her not to repeat it. They didn’t think, though, to tell the same to their eldest son, who was reading in the corner of the delivery room. 

Once the baby came home, Mycroft scurried to the cradle and craned his neck to study Sherlock’s face, which was squashed and ancient-looking and mottled red from screaming. Sherlock’s eyes were at once knowing and unfocused, utterly old and utterly new.

“You’re strange,” Mycroft said, “and not very interesting as yet.” Sherlock’s face went slack with sleep, a spit bubble forming over his mouth and popping as he exhaled. “This will be more engaging when you understand me,” sighed Mycroft, sounding quite world-weary for a child of seven.

Sherlock did become more interesting, though he became no less strange. He studied at length, though rarely what was assigned him in school; he was calm and stormy, still and agitated, quiet and impossible to silence; he hid his heartlessness, but he had no friends. He drove Mycroft to raised hackles and hissing fits, and he relished every moment of it. Until the teasing taught him not to, he insisted, unusually for a boy of his rational nature, that he would never be happy without his partner. “He was a doctor and a soldier. He came through with me, but I don’t know where he’s gone. You must help me find him,” he informed his parents on his fifth birthday. For that, he’d received neither help nor cake. He didn’t care about the cake--cake was boring--but he never forgave them for their refusal to help. 

He took solace in his city. Sherlock tore through London like a bullet through a wall, snuck through London like smoke through a vent, poured himself into London like tea into china. It was a dance, he felt, a grand _pas de deux_ with a vast and shifting partner. On the best days, Sherlock moved as one with the fog and the cabs and the raindrops spattering the Thames, reflecting the city’s moods with his every motion, dancing its steps back to it. He was mere transport for the cacophony that surrounded him: it was bliss.

His favourite place in his city was his parents’ roof; he referred to it, though never out loud, as his crow’s nest. He would perch there and watch the freight trains rattle through as he deduced what they carried and where they were going. He stowed away on them several times, though once, he was caught by a stout man in overalls who gave him a shouting-at, then handed him a butterscotch and made him promise to run straight home to his mother. He gave the sweet to Mycroft, who noticed straight away that Sherlock had spat on it.

Sherlock didn’t find his doctor. By his teenaged years, he stopped looking: no one could want him, gawky, ugly thing that he was. Awkward. Friendless. Heartless. Better, he thought, never to find the doctor than to find him and be rejected; London was his only friend, and London was enough.

The years ran past. Mycroft moved away, and Sherlock went to university. He studied biology and chemistry, anatomy and the dead. He learned to read bodies for clues. “He’s so weird,” his classmates said as he passed, “I’ve seen him talk to corpses, but good luck getting a bloody word out of him if you’re among the living.”

He found one friend, a chemist called Victor. Victor was not inadequate, and knowing him was surprisingly pleasant. He liked the city. He understood the dance.

After university, Sherlock took rooms on Montague Street. He refused to be a detective--that was the story that he had broken away from, and he wanted no part of it--but he took on clients who wanted his sharp eyes and sharp mind, and he traced the threads connecting the crimes of his private clients with the crimes he read about in the morning papers. He deduced that one mind, as clever as his own, was behind these designs--could it be that the magpie had followed him through? 

What he did was not detection. It was The Work. Otherwise, what was his free will worth?

As a part of keeping his mind from boredom, he talked a woman who worked in the morgue at Saint Bart’s into giving him chemicals and body parts to study. He experimented on them at home, but his landlady wouldn’t stand for it. She threatened to throw him out for weeks, and one drizzly evening, Sherlock came home to find his lock changed and his possessions and equipment at the kerb. The raindrops were so light and fine in the halos of the lamps that it seemed to take them an eternity to fall.

Sherlock took stock of his situation--no friends, nowhere to live, no DIs at the Met who took him seriously and therefore little work--and groped through the damp grass for the book that hid his needle. Morphine tonight, yes; he grabbed the syringe, pumped his fist, found a vein, and savoured the sting that faded into mind-stilling bliss.

He woke in Mycroft’s spare bedroom with a thick mouth and a crushing headache. Mycroft strode in and went straight to the windows, looking at Sherlock like a cat that had found a broken bird.

“Pricked yourself on a needle, did you?” The chair at the bedside squeaked as Mycroft settled into it. “If you insist on acting like a fairy tale princess, Sherlock, I shall be forced to marry you off like one.”

“Empty threat,” Sherlock groaned. “You’ll never find a prince who’ll have me and _God_ why did you open the curtains?”

“I’ve arranged for a detective sympathetic to your abilities to be promoted,” Mycroft said in lieu of answering him. “You’ll be working with a Detective Inspector Lestrade. Do try not to kill yourself before he can find you a case.”

 _Thank you,_ Sherlock wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Mycroft sighed and left, his expensive shoes clicking like claws on the wooden floor.

Two weeks later, Sherlock moved into a flat on Baker Street. Mrs. Hudson, the owner and one of his first clients, lived on the ground floor.

“You’re lonely,” Mrs. Hudson told him over tea on one grey afternoon.

Sherlock scowled. “I’m not.”

“Hush, Sherlock, you know you are. Find yourself a flatmate, love. And have another biscuit. You look peakish.”

*

Sherlock sat on a bench near Saint Bart’s with Molly, the woman he’d befriended from the morgue. They watched fat drops of rain ripple the pond; a raft of ducks bobbed ashore, stretching and shaking water from their feathers in sinuous bursts. 

“I wish I were a duck,” Molly sighed.

How women thought, Sherlock would never understand. “Why?”

“So I’d have a mate,” said Molly, her voice small.

Sherlock frowned. “Ducks don’t mate for life. You’d have to search anew each breeding season. Hardly an efficient use of your resources, Molly, and given your tendency to pursue the unavailable males around you--”

“I think we ought to get back. I’m sure Mike could use a hand,” Molly said, abruptly standing.

“You don’t need to blush, I’m well aware that you’ve an unrequited infatuation with m--”

_“Sherlock!”_

They walked the mulched path to the morgue. As they walked into the stark, metallic room, Molly waved to Mike, who was preparing for the autopsy of their latest arrival. “Good break, I hope,” Mike said as Sherlock and Molly slid their gloves and masks on. Mike gestured to the woman on the slab before them. “Now, this is Irene Adler. Singer, American, thirty-five or so...”

“Thirty-six,” Irene said, sitting up and holding the sheet to her, “but not bad, Mike.”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows. Molly gasped. Mike fainted dead away.

“Aw, come on. Surely I don’t look that bad?” No one moved. Mike groaned from the floor.

“You were dead,” Sherlock insisted. “I would have signed the certificate myself if Molly weren’t such a stickler for procedure.”

While Molly glared, Irene said, “Well, that’s embarrassing for you. Beaten by a woman who knows her way around a medicine cabinet. Comes in handy when you need to get your ex off your trail and put yourself in the path of a certain detective, I’ll tell you that much.” Irene watched Sherlock’s eyebrows climb ever higher. She smiled as she hopped down from the slab and wrapped the sheet around her. “Outside, Prince Charming. We need to talk.”

Sherlock scowled as he joined her. “‘Prince Charming’?”

“You woke the sleeping beauty.” Irene winked at Molly. 

Once Irene and Sherlock were outside and well away from the door, Irene dropped the flirtatious tone. “Listen,” she said, “I’m from your story, and we have a problem.”

Sherlock blinked. Was that even possible? “The Woman?” _Obviously,_ said her expression. “How did you find me?”

“Well, gee, you made it awfully difficult. ‘Let’s see,’ I thought to myself, ‘what might the greatest detective ever written be up to here in the real world? Oh! Detection!’ Clever disguise, genius.”

“I’m not a detective,” Sherlock grumbled, “I do The Work.” 

“Yeah. Whatever you call it, you made a hell of a mess when you broke your heart, Sherlock. Besides your doctor, you brought me through, and you even snagged that idiot who calls himself a consulting criminal. He’s going by Moriarty this time around.”

Sherlock felt a surge of satisfaction: the magpie _had_ followed him. “I suspected as much. What’s our problem, then?” 

“ _Think._ You sacrificed your heart. That got us out of the story and into Doyle’s world. We have free will now, right? But you’re a detective, I’m a gorgeous American singer who got the best of you”--Sherlock rolled his eyes--“Moriarty’s behind loads of London’s crime. We think we’re doing what we want to do, but that looks a lot like what Doyle wanted us to do, doesn’t it?”

As discreetly as he could, Sherlock glided through the rooms of his mind palace. “You’re implying that Doyle’s been writing our lives here?”

“Sometimes, yes,” Irene said, adjusting her sheet. “I don’t think he has total control--I doubt we could be having this conversation if he did. But he’s shaping the things he wants, trying to force you to your death. He didn’t mean for you to survive.”

“He’s dead, though. How...?”

“I don’t know,” Irene admitted. “That’s why I need you. I think that together, we can find whatever vessel he put his spirit in and destroy it.”

Sherlock tapped one long shoe on the wet ground. “The story. It’s not the same. I haven’t met my--the doctor,” he said, aching in the hollow where his heart should be. 

“You won’t believe me without him? All right, Prince Charming.” Sherlock scowled. “You wait, then, and when your doctor turns up, you come find me. I’ll be at Molly’s, which I’d better tell her now.” 

They walked back to the morgue. While Irene informed a stammering Molly that the two of them would be living together, effective immediately, Sherlock asked Mike, who seemed to have recovered from his shock, if he knew of anyone who was looking for a flatmate. Mike didn’t, but he promised to keep his ear to the ground. 

Irene slid the necklace she’d been wearing when she was wheeled into the morgue around Molly’s neck. “I hope you’ll accept this for rent until I come into funds,” Irene said, then added, in a murmur, “A gem for a gem.” The teardrop stone twinkled red. Molly blushed. Sherlock rolled his eyes.

*

John limped home to London, his nerves wrecked, to find that his parents had died and his sister had married. Her wife, a woman named Clara who John dimly recalled from Harry’s ballroom classes, set out the tea service that they had inherited from Harry’s mother while Harry helped John bring his meagre possessions up the stairs to his room. 

“You can’t stay here forever, Johnny,” Harry said, crossing her arms in the bedroom doorway. “Just ’til you find yourself a flatmate. Oh, and Da left me his watch, but I’ve no use for it. It’s in the drawer”--She gestured to the bedside table--“in case you want to take it with you.”

John nodded. He stared longingly at the bed and forced himself to make his way downstairs, taking the seat Clara waved him to and gazing into the porcelain cup before him. Tea. Milk. Sugar. Beside it, a biscuit on a saucer. Nothing to show that his life had gone off its rails, he thought, picking at the biscuit; nothing to show that control had got him nowhere.

“I’m sorry,” Clara said, “this is no fit welcome for a war hero like yourself. I baked you a cake, but it didn’t rise.” 

“You must’ve forgot the soda,” Harry said through a mouthful of raisin scone.

“Didn’t stop you eating it,” teased Clara. 

“I’m not a hero,” John mumbled, but they didn’t hear him. He set his biscuit back on the serving tray, poured his tea down the drain, and went to have a lie-down. They let him go.

That afternoon, after a failed attempt at rest, John wandered outside. He took his cane and walked to the pond near Saint Bart’s to watch the ducks, the city jostling around him. From a wooden bench, he watched them swim and dive and feed and squabble. They didn’t make choices, he thought. They didn’t have regrets. 

“John!” John turned his head and had just enough time to hide his surprise as a heavyset man plunked down next to him. 

“Mike. Still here, I see.”

“Teaching. Bastards, the students, all of them. Anyway, what brings you here? I heard you were abroad getting shot at. What happened?”

John was amazed that it wasn’t written on him, somehow: that he had overreached, that people he had loved had died because of him. That he wished that he’d died with them, and that the shame might kill him yet.

“I got shot.”

Mike cleared his throat. “Jesus. Got a place to stay?”

“For now. Can’t impose on Harry forever.”

“I think,” said Mike, “that I might be able to help you.”

The man who looked up from his beakers as John and Mike walked into the morgue had curly black hair and the oddest face John had ever seen: pale, angular, its strange proportions dominated by its inquisitive gaze.

“Afternoon, Sherlock. This is Dr. John Watson, and--”

“Yes, thank you, Mike,” Sherlock said. “He’ll do nicely. Leave us.”

As Mike left, John stared at Sherlock, who took a deep breath and said, “Your birthmarks have faded since you were born, but you clearly have the writing gift. You fear its power, which is stupid of you. You were shot abroad, and the fever you took as a result nearly killed you. You’ve recently returned home, and you’re staying with your brother, who was a dancer before the alcohol got the better of him, but you need to find someplace to live. Frankly, you’re not sure that you _want_ to live. Oh, and there’s the minor matter of your being a story spirit. Rare, that. 

“Now,” Sherlock continued, not giving John a chance to ask him what in the hell was going on, “potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.” Sherlock unbuttoned his aubergine shirt and, to John’s surprise and confusion, pressed John’s hand to the skin of his narrow chest.

No pulse: Sherlock had no heart. Only one kind of spirit could survive like that.

“Sister,” John managed, pausing to bite his lips. Sherlock’s hand was warm over John’s. “Harry is my sister.”

“There’s always something,” Sherlock said, softly. 

“You’re my... you look different, we both do, but you’re the detective, aren’t you? I’ve been...” _I’ve been missing you since the day I was born,_ John thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Clearing his throat and pulling his hand from under Sherlock’s, John pulled his collar wide to reveal the raised tissue on the left side of his chest. 

Sherlock studied John’s scar. “And you’re my doctor. I suspected as much when I saw that you were a story spirit with a military background. Though we can’t become too close, John. My heart...”

“Right.” John pulled his collar closed. “Bad news for us if it mends, isn’t it? I won’t demand that you act on... whatever you may feel for me, Sherlock.” _We’ll just dance around each other. God._

“Good. You’ll join me at 221B Baker Street, then? I’d like you to move in as soon as is convenient. Possibly sooner.” Sherlock’s fingers made quick work of his buttons. “I’ll be waiting.”

On John’s way out, he ran into a mousy morgue attendant. She asked if Sherlock had told him about his broken heart; John nodded, still dazed. She wanted so badly to put him back together, she said. John warned her that if she cared about Sherlock at all, she would leave him alone. 

*

John moved into Baker Street with a cane, a gun, a bag of medical equipment, and a large duffle of clothing and effects. Only after a full run of Sherlock’s old, familiar cycle _(take case don’t eat don’t sleep storm London find clues solve crime get praise preen eat sleep BORED pick fights be ignored sulk take case)_ did John accept his good fortune: he truly had found his detective.

Their cases, though not precisely the same, were as engaging as John remembered. Moriarty sponsored a serial killer who drove a cab and nearly talked Sherlock to death (“I was never in danger,” Sherlock grumbled, though he admired John’s kill shot). He kidnapped innocents and only freed them if Sherlock solved his cryptic puzzles. Forgeries, smuggling, thefts large and small: Moriarty couldn’t harm Sherlock for as long as Sherlock’s heart stayed broken, but he could keep him busy. John fretted over Sherlock’s wounds, stitched him up, forced him to eat and sleep every so often, and wrote up his cases once they were well and truly over.

John’s heart had never been so full. He had work; he had drive and direction; he had a partner. He had the debris of their lives: the knife, the dust, the skull, the slipper of tobacco. And, although Sherlock could make no move to show it, John knew that he had Sherlock’s affections. It wasn’t everything John wanted, no--but it could be enough.

*

A few weeks after their reunion, John and Sherlock called on Irene Adler. It seemed she had “come into funds”, as she’d put it at the morgue, without any trouble; the flat at the address they got from Molly was all creams and golds. Molly herself was reading in a wingback chair when they arrived. She wore a low collar that showed off a crimson stone, which must have cost more than John’s annual salary from the clinic; Sherlock caught John looking, and they had a brief, silent exchange in which John protested that he was a red-blooded male and Sherlock dismissed John’s claim for the crap that even John knew it to be.

Irene smirked from the edge of her pristine white sofa. “Jealous, Sleeping Beauty? And John--I see you turned up.”

“Yes, you were right. No need to rub it in,” Sherlock said, stifling John’s attempt to answer. “You mentioned Doyle, as I recall.”

“Yes. Now that you two have met, it’s obvious that Doyle’s plot is in motion. You solve crimes. Moriarty’s behind them. He’ll separate you from each other, Sherlock and Moriarty will face off, and Sherlock will die.” 

Perplexed, John said, “But that can’t happen. Moriarty can’t hurt him.”

“Not while his heart’s broken, no. But his heart could heal, and in the meantime, Moriarty can hurt you,” said Irene. “Anyway, enough about you two. That bastard could write me off at any moment.” Molly looked up from her book as Irene continued, “I want him gone.”

“We’re looking for an object, then. Something Doyle tied his spirit to,” said Sherlock as he picked up a crystal ashtray and spun it between two long fingers.

Irene nodded. “You realise that destroying Doyle’s spirit won’t stop Moriarty, right? And it won’t stop the story from from starting again if your heart heals. It’ll just free us from Doyle’s influence.”

“Obviously, but if we stop Moriarty and not Doyle, Doyle will send someone else after us. We have to stop them both.”

John squinted in confusion. “So finding Doyle: how do we manage that, exactly? By picking things up and shaking them ‘til a cranky dead writer falls out?”

“Don’t be facetious, John. It has to be something Doyle had access to, something that was preserved,” Sherlock said, shaking his head.

“I doubt anything of his would have been intentionally preserved,” Irene countered. “He was more famous for being torn to pieces by his fans than he was for his writing.”

“There has to be something,” Sherlock insisted, “and we have to find it. ”

Starting the following morning, Irene and Sherlock (and, on the days when they weren’t working, John and Molly) spent the six weeks before Christmas pillaging the dusty recesses of London’s libraries and fraying the nerves of London’s librarians. They studied manuscripts that they weren’t, strictly speaking, allowed to see (“I know a librarian at the Bodleian--well, I know what he likes,” Irene explained to Sherlock, who blushed). After weeks of searching, they found an incantation that would, when spoken aloud with an object in hand, drive away any spirit bound to that object, although the various manuscripts disagreed as to whether the spirit would be destroyed or driven into the afterlife. They tried it on anything at 221B old enough to have been Doyle’s, but to no avail: neither Sherlock’s antiques, nor the skull on the mantle (of which Sherlock had had high hopes), nor John’s scratched old pocket watch so much as grumbled at the incantation.

“Maybe we’re doing it wrong,” John suggested.

“Well, _I’m_ doing it right,” Sherlock insisted. 

Irene rolled her eyes. Molly looked from scowling face to scowling face and bit her lips.

All the while, Moriarty seeped through London, loathsome and untouchable as smog. Sherlock stared out the living room windows at night, the intermittent sounds of John crying out in his sleep interrupting his thoughts, and wondered how, exactly, his own suppression of sentiment protected either of them.

*

Christmas came, and John and Mrs. Hudson held a candlelit celebration at 221B. Sherlock did not attend so much as he sulked on the sofa while the party whirled around him; Irene shoved an antlered headband onto his curls, John pressed a cup of eggnog that smelled positively flammable into his hand, and Molly dangled a piece of mistletoe over his head with an impish expression until Sherlock muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and kissed her on the cheek.

“Mistletoe is a parasite, you know,” Sherlock grumbled, but Molly persisted in looking pleased with herself as she sashayed into the kitchen.

From his seat in John’s chair, Lestrade said something to Mycroft that made Lestrade laugh and Mycroft shake with suppressed mirth. Sherlock didn’t respond, but his face must have betrayed him, because Mrs. Hudson said, forcibly cheerful, “Sherlock, dear, won’t you play for us? It _is_ Christmas.”

Sherlock rose and took his violin from its case. “What’ll you have, Mrs. Hudson?”

“Start with ‘Holly and the Ivy’, if you wouldn’t mind, love. It’s my favourite.”

Sherlock didn’t mind. He played the carol as Mrs. Hudson asked, earning a round of applause, and followed it with more of the guests’ requests. He was halfway through “The First Noel” for Lestrade when there was a _bang_ from the kitchen, followed closely by a thin stream of smoke and what sounded like metal fragments raining onto the lino. John bolted toward the sound, and Sherlock set down his violin as the other partygoers crowded the door. As Sherlock joined them, he heard John shout, “What the bloody hell have you done to my watch?”

Molly stood at the counter, the charred, empty remains of John’s pocket watch smouldering before her. Burnt springs and gears littered the floor. “I thought,” Molly began, fussing with the gem hanging from her neck, “I just, I hadn’t been trying the, the incantation, right? I’d been letting you three do it. And I thought, what if it wasn’t working for you because you were from the story? I’m from here, you know. Like Doyle was. So I tried it, just to see, and...” She gestured to the scattered guts of the watch.

The room went silent. Then Sherlock said, smiling for the first time that night, “Molly Hooper, you are a _genius._ ”

Later, after the watch had been binned, the kitchen cleaned, and the guests coaxed into cabs, John and Sherlock sat in their chairs before the remains of the fire. John sneaked amused glances at Sherlock, or at least attempted to; Sherlock caught him out and demanded, “What? What are you looking at?”

John chuckled. “You forgot about it, didn’t you?”

“Forgot about what?”

“You’re still wearing the headband.”

Sherlock raised a hand to his head, and sure enough, he had a fine set of antlers. He scowled and took them off over John’s protests, dropping them to the floor. “Very funny, John,” Sherlock groused. “Are you sober?” 

John, the infuriating man, was still laughing to himself. “As a judge. Trust me, I don’t have to be drunk to find the antlers funny, Sherlock.”

“That’s not why I was asking.” John stilled at the seriousness of Sherlock’s tone. “Listen, John... we’ve been treating the possibility of my heart being restored, of Moriarty coming for us, as unacceptable. As letting Doyle’s story get the best of us. But it doesn’t have to be like that. We could choose to heal my heart, and when Moriarty came after me, we could make it our triumph. _Our_ story. You could write--”

Grim-faced, John shook his head before Sherlock finished his thought. “I can’t, Sherlock, you’ve no idea how poorly--”

“--you could write,” Sherlock insisted, “a new ending. One where I beat Moriarty.” John clenched and unclenched his left hand, and Sherlock continued, as delicately as he knew how, “I know, John. How bad it was. I don’t know exactly what you did, but I know that it devastated you, and I know that you would never let it happen again.”

John blinked tears from his eyes and took several deep breaths before he answered. “If I write this ending you’re asking me for,” he said, finally. “If I write you a victory, and we heal your heart, and you face off with Moriarty, and you lose...”

A dismissive wave of Sherlock’s hand. “I never lose.”

John raised an eyebrow at him. “Irene?”

“That wasn’t a loss.” Sherlock wrinkled his nose. “That was more of a... a...”

“Loss. The word you’re looking for is ‘loss’.”

Sherlock tapped his fingers on his armrests. “All I want,” he said touchily, “is for you to know that I want to try. Take all the time you need to decide. Now, if you’ll excuse me--”

“I’ll do it.”

Sherlock froze. Took in John’s frightened, determined face. Ached to kiss it calm.

Didn’t.

“All right,” Sherlock murmured, instead. “Good night, John. Merry Christmas.”

*

The next day, John started writing. “Start from the beginning,” Irene told him. “You won’t be so nervous if you’re writing about the past.” John did, writing about Doyle, about his childhood and Sherlock’s. He began on his laptop, but after an increasingly agitated Sherlock burst out that they’d have retired by the time John finished typing the story, John switched to a biro and a composition book. Tongue poking from the corner of his mouth, John wrote, and scratched things out, and got ink all over his left hand, and re-wrote, and tore apart pages and flung them into the fire for the sheer pleasure of watching them burn, and wrote. 

When it came time to write the future, Sherlock helped him with the logistics of outmaneuvering Moriarty (“though if you’re going to hover over my shoulder, Sherlock, you can bloody well refill my tea while you’re there--ha, that drove him right off”), Molly made sure that he got the details of the morgue’s bureaucracy right, and Irene did what she called “quality control”, which seemed to consist of whipping John’s shaky grammar into shape and resulted in three separate shouting matches with Sherlock on the subject of American versus British conventions. 

Finally, the first draft was complete--or, at least, none of the four people reading it had any further suggestions. On Ash Wednesday, John wrote up the final draft on his own, Sherlock’s violin playing in his head. He pictured Sherlock on the roof at Bart’s, Sherlock jumping, Sherlock landing softly in the truck bed his homeless network would prepare for him. If Sherlock survived ( _once_ Sherlock survived, John berated himself), he would be on his own to bring down Moriarty’s syndicate: neither of them had enough information about it for John to write that far ahead.

The story, which had seemed to resist him as he had written it, felt obedient as the final draft flowed from his biro. _You control it, boy,_ John thought, recalling his da’s admonition. _You don’t let it control you._ Trains could only go where someone else had built them rails, and with every word, John laid another tie. This time, though, he craved no glory. He wanted no admiration. He wanted to save Sherlock’s life.

He hoped it was enough.

It was late when John finished. He texted Molly and Irene, who congratulated him, and Sherlock, who confused a mid-sentence Lestrade by walking away from a crime scene to come straight home. 

“You’re done,” Sherlock announced as he burst into the flat, the chilly February night following him in.

John looked up from the sofa, where he was huddled under his grey-and-red plaid blanket, and turned off the telly. “Yeah, that was actually what _I_ told _you_ , Sherlock, so it’s not news to me.”

Shedding his coat and scarf and tossing them onto his chair, Sherlock strode to the sofa and sat at John’s feet. “Fine. Good. Let’s get my heart healed, then, so we can start the story. According to what you’ve written, once my heart’s restored, I’ll summon Moriarty to Saint Bart’s the morning after. I’d rather we didn’t draw this out,” Sherlock said, perching awkwardly at the edge of the cushion. 

“I’ll assume that was your ‘thank you’, then?” John griped. Sherlock didn’t reply, but he looked so miserable that John took pity on him. “Hey,” John said, sitting up and pulling the blanket over his shoulders and Sherlock’s. “Hey. Sherlock.”

Posture stiff, gaze straight ahead, Sherlock stammered, “I don’t--I don’t know how to be affectionate, John.”

John shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Just show me what you’re feeling.”

“What a ludicrous notion. There is nothing I could do that could possibly...” Sherlock’s fingers tapped a nervous tattoo on the Union Jack pillow. 

“Right. Enough thinking,” John said as he rose, the blanket sliding to the sofa. Sherlock looked alarmed until John offered him his hand; Sherlock took it, and John pulled him to his feet. Sherlock stumbled into John’s arms, and John caught him, stepping backward with Sherlock’s momentum. They stood for a moment, John’s arms around Sherlock’s waist, their gazes intent on one another’s. This close, John saw every wrinkle, every line etched on Sherlock’s strange, beloved face. To John, though, Sherlock looked young, and frightened, and John ached to think of him being alone again.

John pressed his face against Sherlock’s shirt, which smelt of road exhaust and cigarettes and nervous sweat. Leaving one arm snug about Sherlock’s waist, he grasped Sherlock’s hand, clasped it in his own, and lifted it high.

Sherlock hummed deep in his pulseless chest. “What are you--?”

“Do you trust me?” The words were muffled against fabric. John felt his own breath hot on his face.

 _“John,”_ Sherlock replied, the name a reassurance and a rebuke.

“All right, then,” John said, taking a small step back. “Follow my lead.”

It wasn’t dancing, not at first: it was swaying. Their hips moved; their shoulders shifted; they didn’t lift their feet. When they did, it was a tentative two-step that shuffled Sherlock’s shoes and John’s bare soles against the parquet. Sherlock caught on quickly, and John led him through box steps, _**one** two three **four** five six,_ and God, John had always been pants at this, but he knew the moves by heart, and Sherlock moved like candlelight in darkness and knew, almost before John did, what John was asking of him--offered, almost before John asked, what John wanted. Before long, John couldn’t tell who was leading and who was following; he and Sherlock spun around the living room, never stumbling, their bodies close and warm and telling and being told.

They eased to a stop in front of the fireplace, holding on to each other, both of them panting. Their sweat glistened in the low light that snuck in from the street.

Sherlock’s heart beat strong in his chest.

“Oh,” John managed.

“The game is on,” Sherlock said, so soft.

John breathed. Tilted his face up. Pressed his lips to the underside of Sherlock’s jaw.

“Stay with me tonight,” Sherlock whispered. “Please.”

John did.

*

It felt no different to Sherlock, sending the text, than it would have if John hadn’t written him doing it:

_Come and play. St. Bart’s rooftop.--SH_

Sherlock listened to his city waking up around him, to John snoring softly in Sherlock’s bed, to the unfamiliar thrum of his own pulse.

It was time.

He slid into his coat. Tied his scarf around his neck. Sneaked a pack of cigarettes into his pocket.

He lingered in the doorway, committing to memory the way John’s blanket crumpled on the sofa. Thought, irritably, _Enough._

Shoulders back, head up, Sherlock descended the seventeen steps, his trust in John unwavering.

*

“Is that really what leaving the flat was like?” John asks, chin settled on Sherlock’s shoulder so he can read the notebook resting against Sherlock’s folded legs. Sherlock’s sprawled between John’s legs and leaning back against John’s chest; Sherlock is writing, and John is watching the ducks play in the pond. “You’re not just trying to make yourself sound cool?”

Sherlock’s hand pauses over the page. He turns his face toward John’s, and their cheeks graze against each other as John imagines Sherlock’s scowl and tries not to smile. “How exactly does this make me sound ‘cool’? I simply described what happened,” Sherlock protests.

John kisses the curve where Sherlock’s neck and shoulder meet. “Sorry,” he grins, “shouldn’t’ve said anything. Carry on.”

“Three years I spent trying to get back to you,” Sherlock grumbles, pen scritching over the page, “and this is what I get.” He pauses, sighs, and tosses the pen and notebook aside. They land in the grass with a soft _fwump_ , and Sherlock rests his hand on John’s knee and squeezes gently. “You are an intolerable distraction, John. I can’t work in these conditions.” 

“Oh, God,” John groans, “I’ve disturbed the artist at work. I’ll never hear the end of it.” 

The ducks call to one another across the pond, dive under the surface and shake droplets from their heads, and bob as the water surges beneath them. A breeze sends ripples over the water and a downy feather through the air in erratic loops until it dives into Sherlock’s curls and lodges there. Sherlock doesn’t notice.

“I’ll admit that I am less interested in writing about my past than I am in thinking about our future. Though that is, I suppose, your area,” Sherlock concedes.

John shakes his head and pulls the feather from Sherlock’s hair. “Yeah, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not write our future. I’d rather no one did. Let’s just live it and see what happens, shall we?”

“Let’s,” Sherlock agrees, stretching out his legs and leaning more heavily against John. John rests one grass-stained hand on Sherlock’s chest and wonders if Sherlock can deduce, from John's touch, how John feels about the heart beating beneath his palm.


End file.
